Announcing availability of ISOs for Visual Studio Updates

Last month, we shipped Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2). We’re continuing to see good uptake of the Update releases, with the majority of Visual Studio 2012 users now running on VS Update. We’re also hearing positive feedback on the VS Update cadence, and the ongoing improvements that it brings to Visual Studio customers.

Many customers have been installing Visual Studio Updates from the “toast” pop-up notification or from the Extensions and Updates dialog. This continues to be the simplest option. The installer downloads only the components you need (based on your current VS installed configuration), and then installs the bits as they’re received. This approach often provides a very good experience, but it does require being connected to the internet for the duration of the install. Because a connection isn’t always available, the installer also supports a /layout flag, which downloads all of the bits proactively to enable subsequent offline installation. For more details on using this option, please see “How to install Visual Studio Update 2 Offline”, as referenced in the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 KB.

In tracking the release feedback, we’ve also observed a set of users requesting an ISO image as an alternative way to download the update. The primary reasons we’ve seen for such requests are familiarity both with the format and with various download management tools. While our download telemetry shows a higher historical success rate for downloads occurring via the Visual Studio installer versus single, large ISO files, we recognize that the convenience of the ISO format may better meet some customers’ overall deployment needs. We are therefore happy to announce that we have built an ISO image for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 and made it available for download!

We also plan to ship ISO images for the RTM version of future Visual Studio updates, in addition to the existing distribution mechanism we already provide. We hope you will enjoy this additional option for downloading Visual Studio Updates.

Eric Knox – Development Manager, Visual Studio

Short Bio: Eric has been at Microsoft for 19 years, working on various parts of Visual Studio for the last 15 years. His current role is the development manager in charge of performance, reliability and acquisition of Visual Studio.

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If you are a C++ programmer, and especially if you have C++/CLI code, you might want to hold off on Update 2. There are problems in debugging. And, if you install Update 2 and decide you don't like it, think twice about trying to uninstall it. My colleague was down a long time trying to get his system working again. This quarterly update thing is a great idea, but you can't do it if the updates are going to regress in key areas, and we need a clean uninstall process for these things in the event that we do find problems.

@Tom Kirby-Green and @Peter van der Goes: please recognize that the /layout option is still our preferred option over ISO images for doing multiple installs, mainly because our data shows a higher download success rate and the /layout path also does better early failure detection than an ISO install will. But having said that, I’m glad it will help you be more successful.

@Maximilian Haru Raditya: the info for this ISO is:

SHA: F8F1FB3665CF7D4918FDFFBBAE16D351F14A1ECA

CRC: A9B49F56

All: I received offline feedback that the text above wasn’t clear enough, so I wanted to explicitly say that when we ship ISO images with future updates, the links to those images (and their SHA/CRC info) will be on the official download page. This particular ISO for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 is linked only from this blog simply because it’s the first one we’ve built for updates, and we felt it was better to start smaller in case there are any issues we discover and need to resolve before we publish the next update with its ISO image.

4 years ago

Josh

Thanks so much for listening on this. Can you please talk with the Windows Phone division and help them to start using their uservoice site (or perhaps shut it down if they don't care about it).

4 years ago

josh

been looking for this as i have a number of pcs with shared limited connectivity

Oh, one more thing. I notice that /layout doesn't seem to support resumable (and thus suspendable). Thus, downloading 1.8 GB of files over a not-so-fast-and-not-so-reliable internet connection would be cumbersome. I once had to start over and over again. I hope it could support resumable feature like in any download managers in these days.

Thanks for your feedback. This issue will be fixed in a forthcoming update. The Visual C++ team would like to hear more feedback, are you interested in chatting? Ping me ebattali@microsoft.com (I am a community PM on the team).

1. Is this VS2012.2.iso is actual ISO of Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate RTM with already integrated Update 2? So can I replace my original V2012 Ultimate RTM ISO with this one?

2. One of the part of VS2012 is built-in shrinked version of SQL Server 2012, as I already paid attention neither Microsoft Update, nor Visual Studio Updater don't deal with update of built-in SQL Server 2012 version, I mean, I didn't see any notification about SQL Server 2012's Service Pack, Cumulative Update etc. The version of built-in SQL Server is seriously outdated.

In order to update it I have to manually go to Microsoft Update website and check for updates. Is there any way to automate the process and make it much more easy, e.g. check, offer to download & install SQL Servers updates during the routine VS Update check.

Resumable downloading would be a great feature. I too had to re-download due to a connection issue.

4 years ago

Shaun Miller - MSFT

@Zahir, We did not make a fix to the Visual C++ Redistributable components in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2. The “Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 1” download page (http://www.microsoft.com/…/details.aspx) was updated with the following text to indicate that the redistributable components were not updated: “Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 is compatible with Visual Studio 2012 Update 2.”

Shaun Miller

Principal Test Lead

Microsoft

Visual C++

4 years ago

Chris Marisic

Great little addition to the ecosystem.

@Common Sense there's a great start menu, just put your mouse/finger in the corner of your screen or hit the start button on your keyboard.

My app no longer works in XP. It has a box and it is dead. If this is an update, why not stop doing these before it all goes the way of Windows 8 and then where will it be?

4 years ago

qwerty

There is also a set of users such as myself who could not run the update 2 installer because it fails half-way with cannot download X package. So this ISO image for me isn't about familiarity or whatever, it's the only thing that actually works. Plenty of comments/posts from people in the same situation as myself on the internet.

4 years ago

Metro programmer

Please, tell me one thing. If I create a simple free WinRT Metro program using vs2012 express — not for windows store(!), but for distribution only from my website, then I need to obtain a free developer license which must be renewed every 30 days using live internet connection, after that pay 100$ for the dev subscription, push it through Windows Store, or the tricky "domain" stuff, and only then it will be available through my website?? Am I right?? Explain me in several words, easily, is there a simpler way to distribute my free metro apps using my free website, please!!!

You're right that our downloader should be capable of resuming, and in fact, that's what we originally designed it to do. However, somewhere along the way, we clearly messed up b/c it isn't properly recognizing previously downloaded packages. We're investigating and will fix it in a future release.

@Mike B. IL:

1. This is an ISO of just Update 2; it does *not* include RTM + Update 2. That's an idea that we're discussing, but we don't currently have plans to ship RTM + Updates bundled together as a single installer.

2. In terms of VS Update also applying to installed SQL Server pieces, my initial reaction is that upgrading a server (i.e. SQL Server) or runtime that ships independently is intentionally out of scope for VS Updates. I can understand the potential convenience of it, but at the same time, I don't believe I would want to potentially upgrade/change a server while updating tools.

@qwerty:

I believe you're hitting a different problem that an ISO image won't actually solve. What we've seen so far for those failing to install the "Windows App Certification Kit" is that their machines have turned off the ability to auto-update root certificates used to verify digital signatures. If you're in this case, installing from the ISO will still fail, but it will fail during installation rather than during download. To fix this, you'll either have to turn on Windows' ability to auto-update root certificates or manually install an updated set of root certs. You can read more about how to do that here: KB931125 [for manually updating your system, scroll down to the section "Root update package through the Microsoft Update Catalog" to see how to find the right update for your OS.]

4 years ago

Joe

I too like the ISO very much, thank you. Please, please, always remember that not everyone works in a company that can afford for many people to download exactly the same bits. Having one person download it, and then installing locally is definitely the way to go for many.

Secondly, and completely off topic, I too am very disappointed by the "gotta renew the developers license every 30 days" thing. Especially since it seems to require an administrator to do the renewal (thats me! :-)).

Keep in mind the principle of least privilege and that many of us really do follow it – our app devs do not have local admin access to their machines, and its a ROYAL pain.

4 years ago

Anonymous

4 years ago

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4 years ago

Jerry

I am glad, I can finally install the update. My workstation doesn't have internet connection and the "/layout" workaround doesn't work due to company guidelines…thank you!

4 years ago

Virendra

Thank You very much.

4 years ago

nna

thanks eric for this post . i just learnt somethin wonderful in this post. http//www.unn.edu.ng

4 years ago

Igor

If the solution is on a network share after building it with visual studio 2012 update 2 it often prompts to reload supposedly externally changed source files. Those files were not changed from anywhere outside Visual Studio IDE so the prompt presented is completely wrong and misleading, not to mention that it also keeps reminding me not to trust network share on my own NAS box.

I really can't understand how and why QA team allows such things to slip to release code. Don't tell me you never tried working with solutions on network share?

4 years ago

Unknown

Thanks 🙂

4 years ago

Tom Gibson

This is a must for our company, neither of our development networks have direct internet access (sandboxed web browsing etc) so an ISO or standalone package is the only way we can possibly get updates! Thanks for releasing it.

4 years ago

saeed

thank you so much you save my internet traffic and i don't need to wast my traffic for fail online installer that is the bad idea to make update online installer i always fail in instal online because of my internet speed

Do you gentlemen have a way to get the tools off of the visual studio 2013 system so that we can configure build servers? Things like Portable Class Library projects; Web Projects; etc. all need specific libraries, and those libraries need to be somehow deployed.

Any advice would be appreciated.

if someone can ping an answer back to [duncan16 at comcast dot net], it'd be appreciated.